


And It May Sound Absurd, But Don't Be Naive

by Anonymous



Category: Sky High (2005), The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:40:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23534701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: "Yeah, well, if life were to suddenly get fair, I doubt it would happen in high school."A Sky High AU where Raven just wants to sit there and do her Mad Science homework in peace, but life has a funny habit of removing that as an option.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, Emori/John Murphy (The 100), Raven Reyes/Miles Ezekiel Shaw
Comments: 2
Kudos: 35
Collections: Anonymous, Non Anonymous TROPED Collection





	And It May Sound Absurd, But Don't Be Naive

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Chopped 100 Challenge, but is just really very way too long, so go check out the actual competitors if you want to read some absolutely amazing superhero Raven stories!  
> Also, you don't have to have seen the movie for this to make sense, but a) you should, because it's a great movie, and b) if Clarke comes across as mildly unlikable in this, it's because she's dealing with her own thing on the side that we don't see.

Raven’s curious, when she hears Griffin’s coming to Sky High.

Of course she is.

How could she not be?

But apparently she’s not curious enough, if the oh-so-subtle whispers and awkward stares in her general direction are any indication.

It’s not like it’s inconspicuous.

So yeah, she’s curious, but she’s not all that overly invested, despite what the school’s rumor mill would have her believing.

Raven isn’t her dad.

Presumably the Griffin girl isn’t her mother.

It’ll be fine.

And realistically, Raven knows, there’s not a whole lot of reason for her to go looking for a fight—her dad deserved to be locked up, no denying it.

He was a villain, plain and simple, and the day he fell out of the sky, Raven had watched on her television screen and felt nothing at all.

So it won’t be a problem.

Not unless Griffin makes it a problem.

Which she won’t.

Griffin comes into the cafeteria with a bunch of other freshmen, and Raven picks at her lunch, ignores the way that she can feel everyone’s eyes darting nervously between the two of them, and wants to roll her own eyes.

_Really_ , she thinks. _People are so dramatic._

She looks up once, halfway through her lunch period, just in time to see Griffin and a few of her crowd of admirers glance away guiltily.

_Dramatic_ , Raven thinks, and goes back to her book with only the slightest sting of apprehension.

But really, just because it’s a thing doesn’t mean that it has to be a big deal.

It’ll be fine.

It’ll all be perfectly fine.

“Did you hear about Griffin?” Shaw asks as soon as she sits down.

She swears the whole room stops breathing.

“You’re horrible,” Raven tells him, and he just laughs. “You’re a horrible person, and you should feel bad.”

Around her, people are muttering, whispering, like she’s going to power up and roast Shaw alive for even daring to bring up the younger student.

Which, like, come on.

Not in front of a teacher.

“I’m a great person,” Shaw says. “I’m also stealing your lab writeup, so if you don’t mind—"

Raven hands it over without complaint, pulls her hand away quick when she can feel the cold rolling off of his skin in waves.

It’s not cheating.

She knows he’ll have gotten the answers right anyhow.

“So, Griffin,” he says, scanning her answers against his own.

“No, Reyes,” Raven says, just to be obnoxious. “And you’re Shaw. Remember?”

“Cute,” he says. “Did you hear she doesn’t have powers?”

Raven had not heard that.

“Huh,” she says, and he shrugs.

“Explains the outfit,” he says. “Just a mockup of her mom’s costume. How’d you find the concentration on number fourteen?”

“Check the scratch paper,” Raven says, because she’d only finished the summer homework last night, and she still doesn’t really have a firm memory of finishing the latter half. “No powers at all?”

“None.” Shaw sets the papers down, slants a look sideways at her. “That going to be a problem?”

Raven takes back her writeup, checks number fourteen, just to be sure.

“Nope,” she says, and means it. “No problem at all.”

Shaw looks like he wants to say something else, but then Dr. Medulla is starting to lecture, and Raven’s spared having to look into anything any more closely than that.

When she gets home, her mom’s out on patrol.

It’s not exactly a surprise.

Patrolling the city isn’t really a daytime job, so it’s not like this is anything out of the ordinary.

Still, the apartment feels empty.

Raven drops the bag full of takeout on the table, makes a mental note to lie to her boss tomorrow and tell her how much her mom and dad just loved the drunken chicken.

Then she washes the dishes that her mom left on the counter, starts a load of laundry, and figures she might as well get a head start on some of the homework.

Medulla assigns all of his homework at the start of the year, and she can usually knock out most of it in the first few weeks, which will give her plenty of time to deal with history and AP Lit and all the other subjects that don’t come as easy to her.

The washing machine churns in the background, and it’s louder than it’s supposed to be, even after Raven patched up the intake pipe, so she figures it must have come unbalanced, and she’ll have to take a look at that sometime in the near future.

Not tonight, though.

The first day back at school is always so _weird_ , after a summer of working in the real world and dealing with real, standard-issue humans.

Everything’s so much larger than life, crazy and cartoonish and just all-around ridiculous.

And Raven’s a sophomore now, so she doesn’t have to deal with the same nervous excitement and naivete that turned her first year into such a disaster.

But still.

It’s always just so strange.

Raven flips through the secondhand textbook that’s a year out of date, hopes Mad Science hasn’t changed enough in the last twelve months that a new edition is actually required, and she wonders if her mom will be home before she leaves for school in the morning.

She isn’t.

So Raven puts the rest of the takeout in the fridge, leaves a sticky note on the front door, and walks down to the bus stop, head still swimming with titrations and acid samples and the mechanisms of a freeze-ray gun.

She waits for the bus in the early morning light, looks up at the empty sky above her and wonders if she’d get in trouble if she tried to fly again.

The first week of classes pass in a blur, and Raven figures a few things out.

First, she learns that Shaw isn’t as quick with the mechanical aspects of Mad Science as she is, but he makes up for it with a mildly alarming fascination with the biochem stuff, so he’s a decent enough lab partner.

Second, she learns that the table at the back left of the cafeteria is usually pretty empty, so it’s a good place for her to camp out and tackle as much of her classwork as she can before she has to head to work after school.

And third, she learns that Clarke Griffin is really, really annoying.

It’s not a thing—it shouldn’t be that much of a thing, it really shouldn’t.

Except.

Except that the younger girl seems to be convinced that Raven’s one bad day from tearing her to shreds at the slightest provocation.

On one hand, it’s kind of funny.

On the other hand, it means that every time she passes Griffin or one of her friends in the hall, the freshmen will clam up, freeze in place, and stare at her until she’s gone.

And Raven’s got a pretty good handle on the whole _my dad was a supervillain_ thing, she’s more or less used to people having certain—expectations.

But she’s not her father.

She’s not her mother, for all that that’s worth.

It’s—a lot, to have everyone staring at her like that all the time.

It’s a lot, to have them waiting for her to be the villain.

And now that she’s noticing, she can’t help but roll her eyes at Griffin’s whole deal in general.

Because, yeah, great, okay, the girl doesn’t have powers.

Whatever.

She’s hardly the first non-super born to a powerful couple.

But Griffin mopes around the halls, sighing and whining about her bad luck, how _unfair_ it all is, and it sets Raven’s teeth on edge.

_Unfair._

Unfair is having a father in prison and a mother who can hardly stand to be in the house for more than five minutes, and a school full of people who stare her into the ground the second she ever even blinks funny, because God forbid she turn out just like her dad—

_Unfair_ , Raven thinks, and she’d roll her eyes, but that’d just scare everyone even worse, and so she grits her teeth, clutches her backpack tighter, and ignores the way that she can feel Griffin’s eyes on her as she slips out of the cafeteria.

Shaw isn’t afraid.

Of course he isn’t, because he’s an obnoxious human being, and also because he doesn’t hate her for that one time freshman year that she crashed into him and nearly gave him a third-degree burn on instinct.

“If I were a shrink,” he says, casual and needling. “I’d say that it’s because she’s coasting on her parents’ laurels while you’re killing yourself trying to get out from under your dad’s shadow.”

“You’re not a shrink,” Raven tells him. “Also, shut the hell up.”

He laughs, which brings Medulla swooping down on their table to tell them off for talking.

Raven just looks him dead in the eyes and empties a dropper full of the latest death chemical onto the table, and their teacher watches it melt straight through the melt-proof table and through a few layers of the floor below.

“Shaw,” he says. “Reyes. Carry on.”

He leaves, and Raven empties the rest of the titration back into the beaker.

It’s always nice, with Medulla.

She always knows exactly where she stands.

“Hey, listen,” Shaw says, towards the end of their lab. “If you’re so tired of Griffin and all of her posse staring at you, you can always come sit with Murphy and Diyoza and me, we’ve got plenty of extra room and all.”

“And watch Murphy and Emori sucking down each other’s tonsils for an hour?” Raven asks, and she rolls her eyes. “Pass.”

“Please,” Shaw says. “Diyoza’s threatened to kill them if they pull that crap again.”

Raven snorts. “Yeah, that’ll do it. Did you seriously say _posse?”_

“Entourage?” he suggests. “Clique? Attendants? _Retinue?”_

“Retinue,” she agrees, because it’s a good word. “Studying for the SAT or something?”

“Always,” he says, and she laughs just a little, and it’s easier than saying that he’s probably right.

About that first bit, that is, the _not-a-shrink_ part—not necessarily about the extra space at the lunch table.

But they finish the rest of their experiment in a comfortable silence, and it isn’t until she’s halfway to her next class that she realizes she’d forgotten to ask why he’d extended the invitation in the first place.

The fight isn’t her fault.

Really, it isn’t.

Well, maybe about 30% her fault.

Arguably 50.

But the way it goes is like this—Raven is sitting at her usually table, trying to slog her way through some god-awful passage in _Atlas Shrugged_ , and she’s about ready to hunt down a necromancer for the sole purpose of killing Ayn Rand all over again—

There’s a rush of motion, a squeak of shoes against the floor—

And someone dumps their lunch directly over her head.

For a second, Raven’s frozen in shock, too stunned to move.

But then she sees the contents of someone’s lunch seeping into the pages of her AP Lit textbook, and she was supposed to sell her books back at the end of the semester, she’d even covered the binding in brown paper to protect the covers—

And she panics.

“What the hell?” she yelps, jumping to her feet—she’s got the half-eaten remains of a sloppy joe sandwich dripping into her eyes, but all she can see is the awful stains spreading across her textbook—

And Clarke Griffin just stares at her.

Shaw is there, pushing a paper towel into her hands, trying to sponge up the worst of the mess on her books, on her backpack.

And Griffin just stands there, mouth agape, like she doesn’t get what the big deal is.

Distantly, Raven knows it was probably an accident.

Griffin may not like her very much, but she doesn’t seem like the kind of person to go out of her way to pick a fight—

But Griffin just stares at her, and then sniffs and says, “Look, Reyes, let’s not do this—”

And Raven feels her mind go blank.

It’s not just about the book.

It _is_ about the book, because she really does need the buyback money, but it’s so many other things on top of that—it’s the way Griffin and her whole retinue skulk around the edges of Raven’s vision, daring her to be a villain—

It’s the way Griffin won’t shut up for one freaking second about how unfair her life is, it’s the way she doesn’t even try to stand up for herself, just rests on the family name and expects that to be enough, expects everyone to just _hand_ her everything—

It’s so many other things, and it’s also the way that Griffin stares at her, when Raven pushes Shaw away.

“Look,” she says, voice dismissive. “Just because my mom put your dad away—”

Raven lunges, and Shaw tries to intervene, but Griffin falls, and Raven’s mind is swallowed up in a haze of fire and anger, and she powers up for the first time since freshman year, and the cafeteria around her dissolves into chaos as flames lick against the ceiling.

She gets detention.

They both do.

Half the cafeteria was destroyed, of course they had to get some sort of punishment.

Griffin doesn’t seem to mind.

She powered up halfway through the fight, and so she’s riding on the high that comes from finally—finally—not being powerless.

Raven doesn’t blame her.

But she does hate her, just a little.

Griffin is basking in the glow of her newfound strength, in the way that her friends had gasped and gaped and generally looked at her with stars in their eyes.

Raven wonders if she feels like a hero now.

She wonders if that will be enough.

“You okay?” Shaw asks, too quiet in the silence of the room.

When Griffin had thrown her through the nearest wall, Shaw had leapt into the fight.

That’s what Principal Powers says, anyhow.

Raven wasn’t really there to see it.

She’ll have to take their word for it.

“I’m fine,” she says, because she is.

She’s her father’s daughter, for better or for worse.

It takes a lot more than a little bit of concrete to knock her down.

And she’s her mother’s daughter, for better or for worse.

(She knows how to take a hit.)

“You didn’t have to step in,” she tells him, and he scoffs. “I would’ve been fine.”

“Sure,” he says easily. “Concussed, but fine.”

Raven rolls her eyes.

On the other side of the detention room, Griffin is watching them, and Raven meets her gaze and glares until the other girl looks away.

One good thing comes out of it all, Raven guesses.

At least Griffin isn’t afraid of her anymore.

She’s still got her little clique—some curly-haired guy who’s in a few of Raven’s classes, two other boys who Raven mentally refers to as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, because for the life of her, she can’t tell them apart, and then another blonde chick who’s mostly friendly in that inoffensive freshman kind of way—

“See?” Shaw says. “All it took was a few cracked ribs. Easy.”

“I didn’t crack any ribs,” Raven grumbles, because it feels like it’s important.

Griffin and her friends aren’t afraid of her, which is nice, because it means less of the wide-eyed, deer-in-the-headlights vibes, but also is kind of a bummer, because it apparently translates into more cloying sympathy, like her life is just so _hard_ , and Griffin and her posse just feel so _bad_ for her.

So, yeah, it’s really only halfway good.

“Oh, well,” Shaw says. “As long as you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” Raven says, and wonders if she missed her window to say that she appreciates him stepping into the fight.

“That reminds me,” he says, and she has no clue what, exactly, has reminded him. “I was talking to Murphy—”

“That was your first mistake.”

“—and he said Emori knows this girl who’s got a younger brother who’s a freshman, and he knows this other kid—”

“Cut to the important part, Shaw.”

Shaw laughs, and the important part is that there’s a freshman kid whose superpower is disappearing things.

“What,” Raven says. “Like bodies?”

“Cute,” Shaw says. “Like tomato stains in textbooks.”

Raven blinks. “How did you—”

“I hear things, Reyes,” he says loftily. “I’ve got a finger on the pulse of this whole place.”

“Lucky me,” she says, and then, because she figures she owes it to him at least once—“Thanks.”

“No problem,” he says, and grins anyway, so that she rolls her eyes and bites her tongue back from telling him not to make it a whole thing.

But she gets her books cleaned.

All it takes is asking.

So that’s how that goes, and she guesses it could have gone a whole lot worse.

Things sort of come to a head during gym class.

Because where else was she supposed to sort out her high school drama?

_Really_ , Raven thinks, as she slumps in her seat and watches as Shaw gets his ass kicked on the floor down below. _How cliché can you get?_

Save the Citizen is a rigged game.

Everyone knows it.

Supers like Collins and Emerson, they’re able to keep wiping the floor with all contenders because their powers are mostly contained.

Supers whose powers are more or less separate from their physical person— _sorry, Shaw_ —are already at risk of catching their partners in the crossfire, and when it’s compounded with the fact that Collins can lead their fire, stand still and then blur away at the last minute—

Shaw and Diyoza put up a good fight, but in the end, Shaw accidentally catches Diyoza with a blast of ice, and the timer ticks down the last few seconds, and the citizen falls into the shredder.

The crowd goes wild.

“God,” Murphy says pleasantly. “We’re a bloodthirsty bunch, aren’t we?”

“Speak for yourself,” Raven says, watching Shaw help Diyoza to her feet as Collins and Emerson gloat, and Murphy laughs.

“I am,” he says, innocent, and Emori smacks him upside the head.

Down on the mats, Coach Boomer is telling Shaw and Diyoza to hit the showers, rejoin the rest of the audience, even though Raven suspects Diyoza’s going to bail and head for the nurse’s office instead.

The victors get to pick their next combatants. There’s an air of anticipation in the gym, something’s happening that Raven doesn’t know about, and it sets her on edge.

“We want Griffin,” Collins calls, with a grin that turns Raven’s stomach, and he’s drawing it out, savoring the moment—

“And Raven,” Emerson blurts, too impatient to let it last. “Clarke Griffin and Raven Reyes.”

_Okay_ , Raven thinks, and pushes herself to her feet while Murphy gives her a Hunger Games salute and Emori tells her to watch out for Emerson if he tries to slingshot his partner— _Okay, so we’re doing this, I guess_.

It’s almost pretty easy—up until it’s not.

Raven pulls on the standard-issue body armor that smells vaguely of a couple hundred other students, and it’s kind of funny, because both she and Griffin have proven that they don’t exactly need body armor, do they?

“We need a plan,” Griffin says, the first thing she’s said to Raven since the fight in the cafeteria. “Some sort of plan, for when we go out there.”

“You take care of Emerson,” Raven offers, and ignores the way that it feels like a truce. “I’ll handle Collins.”

“Oh, right,” Griffin says. “You guys used to—”

She cuts herself off, and Raven gives her a halfhearted glare, and then it’s time for them to go back out on the mats.

Emerson slingshots Collins—lets him bounce off his unnaturally distended limbs, gives the speedster a head start as he goes blurring around the arena—

Raven pitches a few times, watches the bolts of flame crash against the guardboards right behind him, and smiles just a little as he runs even faster.

She leaps after him, uses a jet of flame to push herself a little bit higher—it’s not the same as flying, so it’s safe, it’s okay—and knocks him out of his trajectory so that he stumbles and almost falls.

She and Collins, they were kids together.

She knows all of his moves.

Or at least, she thinks she does, but then he’s running right at her, and she powers up, thinks to herself that as soon as he gets close enough, she can just clothesline the idiot—

But then there’s a blur around her, a rush of motion on every side, and her flames sputter out, and suddenly, quite suddenly, Raven finds that she cannot breathe.

She can’t breathe.

The flames go out and she can’t breathe.

A vortex.

Raven stumbles and falls, gasps in one breath and then another, but there’s no oxygen in it, and her mind is racing, searching for a way out—

_I am not dying in a freaking gym class_ , she thinks, and tries desperately to find the strength to stand.

It doesn’t come. She’s on her hands and knees, and her lungs are heaving for air, and she’s dimly aware that her hands are scrabbling at her throat, and is Finn out of his mind, does he really think he can get away with this, is this some sort of messed-up revenge—

Someone snatches Collins out of his circuit, and Raven nearly sobs in relief, chokes in one breath, another breath, pushes away the black at the edge of her vision—

She has just enough time to see Emerson raise the remains of a park bench prop over Griffin’s head, where the other girl is making short work of beating Collins into a pulp—

Raven powers up, and Griffin’s eyes go wide, because she’s still kind of an idiot, and she thinks Raven is aiming for her—

The two firebolts catch Emerson right in the chest, one after another, and he goes flying back until he slams into the guardboards and lies still—

Ten seconds left.

Ten seconds left, and the crowd is cheering, counting them down, eager to see another citizen fall—

Griffin looks back, just long enough to catch Raven’s eye, and she nods.

Five seconds left.

One second, Raven’s just barely starting to stagger to her feet, and the next, Griffin sends her flying through the air, and she crashes into the mannequin, has just enough presence of mind to grab onto it, hang on like death—

Two seconds left, and she slams into the ground, rolls to take the impact, and feels the mannequin land heavy on top of her.

_Safe_.

The buzzer goes off, and the crowd loses its mind.

Raven waits until the people swarming onto the floor to congratulate Griffin have passed her by, and then she pushes herself up to her feet and goes to see if she can steal an oxygen tank from the nurse.

“Was Emerson surprised?” Shaw asks, clearly delighted. “I bet he was surprised. God, I wish I could’ve seen his face.”

“Sorry to inconvenience you,” Diyoza says, dry, and he waves her away.

“He may have been a little bit surprised,” Raven says, from behind the mask of her oxygen tank. “Not as surprised as Collins, though.”

Shaw laughs.

They’re sitting in the back of the nurse’s office, where it’s dark and calm and quiet, and Raven’s feeling kind of sleepy, but in a good way, and she’s vaguely aware that she’s probably got to get ready to head to work in an hour or so, but she’s not feeling too bad about skipping the last few classes.

After the day she’s had, she thinks she’s earned it.

The oxygen is going straight to her head, a dizzying rush that’s like the exact opposite of standing up too fast and feeling the blood drain from her mind.

“You know, you don’t have to be here,” Diyoza tells Shaw, all smug and obnoxious. “You can, in fact, go back to class.”

“Shut up,” he says, without any real heat behind it. “Why would I want to do that?”

“Right,” Diyoza says, and Raven’s let her eyes close, so if the other girl is adding any sort of significant look to the statement, she misses it. “Why would you?”

“Shut up,” Shaw says again, but Raven thinks he might be laughing.

Murphy and Emori come crash their little party about ten minutes later, and Raven watches Murphy and Shaw bickering good-naturedly while Diyoza and Emori roll their eyes at her and at each other, lets the sounds wash over her, and finds that she might be dangerously close to falling asleep.

At some point, Shaw shifts to sitting at the foot of her bed, easy as anything.

“You’re okay, though, right?” he asks, as quiet as he was in the detention block. “You’re—everything’s okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” she says, and he shrugs, accepts the answer.

The conversation shifts to the homecoming dance, coming up pretty soon, and Raven drifts off to sleep before she can even register the point of the conversation.

But it’s alright.

She thinks it’ll be alright.

Two hours later, she’s busing tables at The Paper Lantern, and things are most definitely _not_ alright.

For a lot of reasons, but mostly because she likes to keep her work life and her school life and her home life decidedly separate, and having one of Griffin’s entourage sitting in a corner booth and looking mopey kind of throws a wrench right in the middle of that whole process.

She sits down in the booth and says, “You’re Griffin’s friend, right?”

The guy looks over at her, startled, and Raven shrugs, because it’s easier than saying _what in any god’s name are you doing here_ and _what can I do to make you leave?_

“Uh,” he says, and Raven catches an ironic twist to his smile. “Usually, yeah.”

So here’s how it goes—Griffin stood him up.

His name’s Bellamy, which saves Raven the trouble of referring to him as _the curly-haired one_ , and he’s the same age as she is—a little bit older, actually—but still only a freshman, because he’d skipped a year to take care of his younger sister—

He’s also desperately in love with Clarke Griffin.

_Well,_ Raven thinks. _At least he’s self-aware about it_.

She sort of remembers him from the cafeteria fight, past the haze of fire and anger.

The official story is that he doesn’t have any powers, but he’s easy and relaxed, chatting about his sister and about growing up without their dad, and there are just a few little details that don’t add up, and Raven suddenly isn’t so sure that she believes that.

_He’s cute_ , she thinks, somewhere around the third story about how he and Griffin have apparently been best friends for life. _Griffin’s an idiot._

“So ask her to homecoming,” she says, when he finally pauses to take a breath. “That’s the way these things are supposed to go, right?”

He makes a face, but he doesn’t get annoyed at her inability to offer sympathetic nonsense, so she figures he’s an alright kind of guy.

“A little too late for that,” he says, and he’s still smiling, but there’s no question that it hurts to say out loud. “She’s kind of found someone else, and he’s perfect.”

He says it like a matter of fact, like it only makes sense that Griffin wouldn’t be waiting around for him, that she’s found someone apparently worlds better.

“So what?” Raven says, because she’s never been good at the whole Advice With Friends deal. “You’re just going to sit around pining for the rest of your high school career?”

“Pine?” he says, an imitation of a voice she doesn’t recognize. “Men don’t pine. Girls pine. Men just _suffer._ ”

Raven raises an eyebrow.

“It’s from a movie,” he says, after a moment. “1930’s dialogue.”

“Hence the voice?”

“Right.”

“God, you’re a nerd,” Raven tells him, and he laughs, unoffended. “Ask her out already.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Bellamy says, and she shrugs.

“Happy to help.”

The perfect guy for Griffin, as it turns out, is Kyle Wick.

“No,” Raven says. “What? No. Ew.”

Bellamy shrugs, sitting across from her in the middle of the cafeteria, in front of God and everyone, and Raven’s wondering how her life got this out of control.

“That’s what I was going to say,” he says, easy as anything. “But then I told her I was taking you to the dance instead.”

Shaw makes a strangled sort of noise.

Murphy starts laughing.

“ _What_ ,” Raven says.

It isn’t a question.

Murphy is full-on cackling now, and Emori is making a decent show of trying to get him to calm down, but she looks dangerously close to laughing, too.

“What,” Raven says again, and then, helpless— _“Why?”_

Of course, Griffin chooses that exact moment to make her entrance, and Raven understands.

The girl’s hanging off Kyle’s arm, and Raven knows him, knows that he knows how to be charming, when he wants to be, knows how to be sweet and funny and charming and likeable.

She can’t look at him for too long without wanting to set something on fire.

On her first day at Sky High, Wick had been so very friendly, so very welcoming and encouraging, and he’d been a junior when she was just a freshman, and he was so grown-up and mature and _handsome_ —

Also, as it happened, he was a major dick.

He’d been so _nice_ , and so had Collins, and a few other guys, besides, and Raven had let herself believe that she’d been worried about nothing.

She had Collins, and he was the _perfect_ boyfriend, and all of his friends were so _nice_ , and Wick was so _cool_ for an older guy, and their little friend group was just so _cool_.

And then.

There had been some whispers that she hadn’t been able to ignore—something about a joke between friends—and Raven hadn’t even needed to power up in order to beat him unconscious while Collins ran to get a teacher.

It had been a bet.

A bet on who could get their leg over the supervillain’s daughter first.

Raven had told the principal about the bet, and she suspects that that was the only reason she hadn’t been suspended—but then again, neither had Collins.

And neither had Wick.

It should probably be enough.

It doesn’t really feel like it, though.

Flash back to the present, and Raven’s sitting there, watching Wick whisper something in Griffin’s ear that makes her laugh, and she can’t help but wonder what his game is.

Bellamy’s looking pretty miserable, and Murphy’s still laughing like a hyena, but the freshman hasn’t bolted yet.

It must have taken a lot, Raven thinks, for him to come over and sit down at their table.

And it’s possible that Wick does actually like Griffin, she knows, since Griffin seems to be pretty likeable, according to everyone except her.

If that’s the case, Raven thinks with a savage twist of amusement, then it’s practically her sovereign duty to break them up.

So, yeah.

Why the hell not?

“You don’t like me,” she says, just to be extra clear. “You’re just doing this to make Griffin jealous?”

Bellamy nods, like he’s worried that that’s going to offend her.

“Then I’m in,” she says, and grins. “But I’m not buying a dress.”

Bellamy laughs in relief, and by the end of the lunch period, he and Murphy are getting on like a house on fire, which is mildly disturbing but also not the worst thing in the world.

“This is probably not a good idea,” Shaw says, as they’re heading to Mad Science after lunch.

“This is probably a terrible idea,” Raven agrees. “But what else am I gonna do, right?”

He rolls his eyes. “Because that’s always a great reason to do something.”

She laughs at the doubt in his tone.

“Really,” she says. “It’s a win all around. Bellamy gets to make Griffin jealous, because, really, look at me.”

“I’m looking,” Shaw says, but he’s almost smiling, so she ignores him.

“And I get to either break Wick’s heart or ruin whatever nefarious business he’s planning,” she continues. “Like I said, it’s a win for everyone.”

“Well, when you put it like that,” he says, dry.

Raven bumps him with her shoulder as they enter Mad Science.

“Don’t worry,” she tells him. “I’ll save you a dance anyways.”

And just like that, Bellamy’s a part of her little circle of friends.

By extension, so is the rest of the clique that Griffin’s abandoned in favor of Wick and his buddies, which means that Raven finally learns that Rosencrantz is actually named Monty and Guildenstern is actually named Jasper.

She still calls them R and G in her head, though.

It’s easier.

The blonde girl who Rosencrantz-Monty is hopelessly pining over is named Harper, and she’s nice enough, and it’s not the worst thing in the world, to have to cram into a smaller space around the lunch table.

Murphy complains loudly, and Emori tells him to stop being such a diva, but Shaw and Diyoza take to the intrusion well enough, and really, it’s not the worst thing in the world.

Well, except for the fake-dating part.

That part’s kind of a pain.

Really, though, Bellamy’s making it as painless as possible—he’ll slide into the seat next to her at lunch, let her lean against him and laugh too loudly whenever Griffin walks by.

“You’re pathetic,” Raven tells him, and pets at his hair when he slumps forward to drop his head on the table.

“So pathetic,” he agrees, but Griffin keeps sneaking looks in their direction, and Raven’s kind of reluctantly impressed, because this might actually work.

The school’s ramping up for homecoming, which Raven has always found more than a little bit stupid, because they don’t even have a football team, so why exactly do they have a homecoming dance?

“It’s about the _traditions_ ,” Shaw says, when she points this out. “It’s a _cultural_ thing, Raven.”

“Oh, well,” Raven says. “Gotta keep with tradition.”

“My mission in life,” he says. “Either that or actually starting a football team.”

“Co-ed, of course?”

“Of course,” he agrees. “Diyoza’s been waiting for her chance to pulverize Emerson since he beat us at Save the Citizen. What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t provide her with a healthy outlet for all of her aggression?”

“Naturally,” Raven says. “I’ll help her.”

“And I’ll cheer you both on from the sidelines,” he says, and scoffs when she laughs. “What are you laughing for? I’d make a great cheerleader.”

“Pom-poms and all,” she says. “Well, let me know when Principal Powers approves.”

“If I get you a spot on the team, will you let me wear your letterman jacket?”

“Isn’t that nepotism?” she asks, and he laughs now, too.

“No,” he says. “Just favoritism.”

Harper wants to go dress shopping.

Diyoza sort of looks like she’d rather stick thumbtacks in her spine, but Emori looks kind of embarrassedly intrigued by the idea, and Raven’s going along just to back the other two up in case the older girl gets too snarky.

“And then I was thinking,” Harper says, excited. “We could do a mani-pedi at this great little salon I know! If we all go in as a group, we can get our nails done so that they’re _matching_ —”

It isn’t until all the blood finally drains from Diyoza’s face—somewhere around Harper’s insistence that she’s found the _cutest_ little hair place where they serve sparkling mineral water to all the guests—that Bellamy finally breaks down laughing, and Raven realizes that Harper’s as much of a little shit as the rest of them.

She shouldn’t be surprised.

Bellamy seems to seek that out in his friends.

“You’re awful,” Murphy says, sounding reluctantly impressed, and Harper winks at him.

“But I do want to go dress shopping,” she says. “Me and Emori are going, anyhow. If anyone else wants to tag along, feel free.”

Raven goes.

It’s a little awkward, at first, and there’s a moment when Emori drops the illusion she usually holds over her bad hand, the one that only Murphy’s really ever seen her without, and Raven holds her breath while Diyoza looks ready to murder anyone who looks at them funny.

But Harper takes it in stride, and Raven watches Emori relax by degrees until the moment is over, and then she sifts through the rack of clearance dresses and thinks that could be going a whole lot worse, all things considered.

She told Bellamy she wasn’t going to buy a dress, and she wasn’t planning on it.

But there’s a dress that’s hanging in the back at half-price, and it looks like the kind of thing she’ll wear in the future, and if she does, then it doesn’t count as buying something just for a dress, does it?

“No,” Emori says, and Harper says, “Yeah, no, of course not.”

Diyoza ends up buying a pantsuit, and Raven has the saleslady hold the dress until her paycheck clears on Friday, and it’s not the worst Sunday she’s ever had.

The night before the dance, Clarke Griffin shows up at The Paper Lantern.

When Raven sees her, it’s all she can do not to roll her eyes, because this is just where her life is at, apparently. But instead, she marches over and slides into the booth where the freshman’s sitting, because seriously, when did her workplace become the go-to spot for lovesick freshmen?

“What are you doing here?” she asks, and Griffin blinks, like the idea of having an after-school job is somehow beyond the pale.

“I’m—I was supposed to be meeting Bellamy,” she says. “You wouldn’t happen to know where he is, would he?”

Raven’s tired.

She’s tired, and she’s still got a couple hours left on her shift, and she’s got a particularly nasty essay to tackle after work, and she’s distracted, and that’s why she says—

“How should I know?”

Griffin raises an eyebrow. “You’re going to Homecoming with him tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Raven says. “Right.”

“Right,” Griffin echoes, and picks at the edge of the tablecloth. “Well, you won’t have to worry about me ruining your night.”

Her voice is small, and Raven looks at the top of her head across the table and feels a horrible swell of something almost like pity.

She knows Kyle Wick.

She knows how this part goes.

“Yeah?” she asks. “Why’s that?”

Griffin shrugs. “Because I’m not going.”

Raven winces.

“Well, that sucks,” she says, and puts the tray she’s been clutching on the table between them. “Seeing as how we’re only going together to make you jealous.”

Griffin’s jaw doesn’t drop, but her eyes go wide, and it’s almost funny, except for the way that Raven really does feel bad, in spite of herself.

“Come on,” she says. “Blake’s crazy into you. You didn’t know?”

Clarke Griffin opens her mouth and closes it a few times, like she’s searching for words that just won’t come, and then finally settles on shaking her head.

Raven looks at her.

For a second, she considers twisting the knife, rubbing it in and making a big deal out of how on earth could anyone not know?

But then all at once, she’s on her hands and knees in the gym again, gasping for air, and it’s the moment before Clarke caught Collins mid-blur, before she remembered how to breathe.

“Well,” she says instead, and makes her voice come out just a little bit quieter than it usually does. “Now you know. So what are you going to do?”

Apparently, what Clarke decides to do is stand Bellamy up altogether.

Not great in a crisis, that one.

“But hey,” Raven points out, while Bellamy pretends he’s not looking around the crowded gym. “At least she dumped Wick, right?”

“Small blessings,” Shaw agrees, and Bellamy smiles weakly.

“I guess so,” he says. “Small blessings.”

It’s about as painfully boring as school dances always are.

Raven pulls Bellamy out onto the dance floor, forces him out of his head for long enough that he looks like he might actually be in danger of enjoying himself, and then she dances with Emori and Harper and Diyoza, and even Murphy stops being his usual cynical self for the time it takes everyone to pretend that they’re only dancing the Cha-Cha slide ironically, because obviously they’re all way too cool to actually be into it—

It’s not so bad.

Not really.

Not at all.

It’s unbelievably hot in the gym, and the decorations are supremely lame, and there are teachers circling zealously through the crowd, making sure that everyone’s leaving room for Jesus with the way they’re dancing—

(Murphy and Emori, predictably, take this as a challenge, and Raven tells them to get a fucking room before someone gets pregnant.)

—and the food is terrible, and someone spikes the punch half an hour in, so that Raven and Shaw take a break from dancing to spread the news, just to be safe, which, in turn, results in the punch bowl being completely empty less than twenty minutes later—

(Murphy laughs out loud when they try to tell him, and Emori asks who they thought spiked it in the first place?)

—and it’s loud and crowded and hot and sweaty, but it’s not too bad.

Raven looks sideways at Shaw, who’s helping her push through the crowd in the general direction of their friends, and she remembers that she owes him a dance, and the rest of the crowd feels far away, just for a second—

So of course, that’s when the supervillain attacks.

It’s Wick.

It’s Wick, because of course it is, right?

Why not?

And he’s got some stupid ray gun that he probably had to hire someone else to build, and he’s got a stupid supervillain name that he screams at them all to call him by, and he’s even got a stupid cape and a bunch of stupid henchman, and it’s all so unbelievably _stupid_ —

But it’s Kyle Wick.

He’s a villain now.

“You know, not to be shallow,” Raven hisses, crawling on her hands and knees through a freaking ventilation shaft. “But this kind of isn’t how I saw my homecoming night going.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Harper whispers back, and Raven would laugh, except she can’t think about anything other than the next bend in the air duct.

Somewhere behind them, the gym is in chaos.

People were screaming, running and panicking, and Raven had screamed, just once, out of frustration and anger and utter disbelief, because whose super evil genius plan is to turn people into babies?

Like, really, what the hell?

“Okay,” Bellamy says, somewhere up ahead. “Okay, there’s a vent coming up, we can get out that way.”

Raven’s relieved in spite of herself, because the goal was never to run away entirely, the goal was just to get out of the kill box, to find a way to regroup before heading back.

Then he says, “Wait, there’s someone—”

The cover goes flying off the vent, and Raven nearly powers up, remembers that to do so, she’d be roasting all the others alive—

And it’s Clarke Griffin.

_Yeah_ , Raven thinks. _Yeah, sure, okay_.

“You guys,” Clarke says, breathless and wide-eyed. “You’re never going to believe this—Kyle Wick is Royal Pain!”

She stares between them, waiting for them to react, waiting for them to gasp in shock and outrage.

Then Murphy, who’s been leaning on Emori since he took a blast from a panicking freshman, says, “Yeah, no shit, Sherlock” and vomits onto the linoleum.

So that sort of sets the tone for the rest of the evening.

In the end, it doesn’t feel real.

That’s the part that Raven will remember, long after everything else has faded—the rushed, unsteady, almost dreamlike quality of the whole fight.

Collins is there, and so is Emerson, and a few other upperclassmen who Raven vaguely remembers from that awful day, her freshman year.

It’s not a surprise.

Who else was Wick ever going to have as helpers?

Who else could he ever convince to do his dirty work?

“Go ahead,” Shaw says, quiet and steady, and when she turns to look at him, his eyes are blue. “We’ll take care of this.”

Murphy’s struggling to keep from falling flat on his face, and Emori is standing with her hands raised in front of him, hatred rolling off of her in waves, and Diyoza is seething, too, staring between the two other supervillains.

_Diyoza’s been waiting for a chance_ , Shaw had said.

So yeah.

They’ve got this covered.

Raven turns and runs, grabs Clarke’s hand and drags her after her, and the edges of the hallway start to fall away into an illusion as they round the nearest corner.

Wick is ranting at one of his minions when they crash into the gym, and Raven powers up immediately, raises both her hands high over her head so that the flame arcs between them.

It’s a trick she learned when she was a little kid, good for a little extra intimidation, and the minion quails at the sight, but Wick just laughs.

“Raven,” he says, like it’s been a while and he’s glad to just touch base, shoot the breeze. “Was wondering when you’d show up.”

It’s a cheap trick, and Raven rolls her eyes, but she doesn’t want to look over at Clarke, in case the other girl believes him, in case her father’s influence is still too strong—

Clarke just snorts.

“Give it up, Kyle,” she says, and swear to God, the only thing missing is the hands-on-hips Wonder Woman pose. “It’s over for you.”

Wick ignores her.

“Raven,” he says. “You hate the Griffins as much as I do, you don’t have to take orders from her—”

Raven looks at him.

She could say something really dumb, she thinks, something cliché about how she’s a hero, and the sins of her father don’t define her, etcetera.

“God, Wick,” she says instead. “You never did learn to quit while you were ahead, did you?”

The first blow Clarke lands is enough to send Wick reeling.

He flies across the room—is literally airborne for a second or two—and then crashes into one of the bay windows, hard enough to send a spiderweb of cracks racing across the face the supposedly unbreakable glass.

Raven doesn’t give him a chance to get up, blasts him three times— _two to the chest, one to the head_ —and he staggers and falls, gasping for breath.

Clarke leaps halfway across the gym in a single step, and Raven had almost forgotten the super strength, but now that it’s not aimed in her general direction, she can admit it’s kind of a little bit impressive.

The minion—she vaguely recognizes some junior who’s in her math class—tries to make a break for the door, but Raven sends his feet skidding out from under him with a single firebolt, and he doesn’t get back up, so she blasts him again, just to be sure—

Clarke has seized Wick by the cape, is yelling at him, and Raven really doesn’t care enough to pay attention, but Wick just laughs, and something about that is wrong—

The door slams open. Bellamy’s there, and so is Shaw—

“Clarke!” Bellamy shouts, and Clarke has just enough time to look up—Raven has just enough time to realize her mistake—

Wick kicks Clarke through the shattered window, and she screams as she falls through the empty air below.

Raven jumps after her before she knows what she’s doing.

She’s done this exactly three times before, but not from this height, and never with this much on the line.

But she jumps, and she falls, and she can see Clarke falling through the sky below her, so she tucks her arms and legs in close, streamlines her body and falls faster.

She’s read the news reports.

On the day her father fell from the sky, it was because he was unable to jet.

His hands had been broken—shattered beyond recognition—until he wasn’t able to send streams of fire shooting out of the palms of his hands, the soles of his feet.

He was a villain.

It was necessary for his defeat.

And Raven’s only tried it three times before, because her mother caught her the third time, screamed herself hoarse over how reckless it was, how they had an image to maintain, and did she want people to think she was just like her father?

Raven falls, and when she opens her eyes, she knows Clarke has seen her.

She catches Clarke by the wrist, points the palm of her other hand towards the earth, and her flames light up the night and send them skittering back up into the sky.

It’s not very graceful.

It’s certainly not very smooth, because she’s only got one hand free, and it’s not like she’s practiced this enough to have it down to a science—

But she flies.

She flies, and she pulls Clarke after her, inch by inch, back up towards the school, until the shattered window swims into view once more, and she manages to summon her last bit of strength to swing Clarke over the edge before collapsing onto the ledge herself.

Someone’s hands are on her arms, pulling her over, and she burns them just a little, she knows she does, but they don’t let go until she’s all the way in, lying on the floor in her ruined dress and trying to stop her head from spinning.

“There,” she says, gasping for breath. “You owe me.”

Clarke laughs, weak and maybe just a little bit terrified, and Raven knows the feeling.

“No,” she says. “I think this just makes us even.”

Raven remembers choking on nothing, scratching at her throat on the same gym floor, the sudden flood of oxygen when Clarke had pulled Collins away.

“Even,” she manages, and staggers to her feet, offers Clarke a hand to pull her up. “Guess I can work with that.”

There’s still work to be done, after that.

The teachers who managed to escape the first blasts of Wick’s ray gun—Royal Pain’s ray gun, whatever—are able to round up the infants who are scattered across the floor, and then Raven and Shaw have to sit there with an infantilized version of Medulla and work out how to build the thing in reverse, because that’s not weird at all.

They take Wick away.

He wasn’t moving, when they took him, and Raven wonders whether it was Shaw or Bellamy who finally put him out.

Doesn’t matter, she supposes.

She and Clarke pretty much had it handled.

And it takes a while to get the gun rebuilt—“He called it The Pacifier,” Shaw says, and Raven says, “oh my God, did he really?”—but then she’s all too happy to hand it over to an actual adult and let them handle the business of turning a bunch of babies back into adults.

Monty and Jasper were hit by the blasts.

So was Harper.

So were a few other kids that she knows from classes or from passing in the hall, and it’s like whatever the next step beyond relief is, to see them whole and restored and back to normal.

Even Murphy’s more or less okay.

She knows this because Bellamy and Clarke have a very emotional sort of reunion next to the shattered window, and Raven decides she really doesn’t need to be seeing this, and Shaw must be thinking the same thing, because he looks at the happy couple and then says, “oh, right, where’re Murphy and Emori?”

So they go to find the others, and everyone’s okay, more or less.

It’s a start, for now.

And Raven’s not an idiot, she knows that it’s all going to catch up with everyone sooner or later, and the school’s probably going to have to shell out a good deal of money in terms of therapy bills, but she doesn’t want to think about that just yet.

By the time they make it back to the gym, Murphy’s still reeling a little, but it isn’t as bad as it was before, and some of the teachers have already patched up the broken window, and someone’s flipped the lights back on, so that everyone’s doing their best to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary is happening here.

Raven can work with that.

“Talk about tactless,” Murphy says cheerfully. “What’s the protocol for dancing when there’s actual blood from your actual classmates on the floor still?”

“I think you probably step over it,” Emori muses.

Raven laughs, and someone starts the music back up again, and she promises herself that she’ll freak out about it all tomorrow.

The gym fills back up again.

There’s a slightly reckless atmosphere to it all, like everyone’s determined to prove that they weren’t affected, that they weren’t afraid, that everything’s perfectly fine.

Raven dances with Diyoza and Harper and Emori, and she doesn’t protest when Harper drags Clarke away from Bellamy for long enough to join them.

It’s alright.

They’ll be alright.

She dances until her feet hurt, until a slower song comes on over the loudspeakers, and then she makes her way to the edges of the crowd.

Murphy and Emori are leaning on each other, and Murphy’s head must be hurting him more than he’s letting on, because he’s not being his usual idiot self, just sort of swaying back and forth with his arms around Emori’s waist.

Bellamy and Clarke are being disgustingly cute.

It’s a whole thing.

Raven thinks about going and finding Monty and Harper, do one more good deed for the decade, but then she decides to just let it lie.

Her feet really do hurt.

_On the upside_ , she tells herself. _Walking is apparently an opt-in kind of deal from here on out_.

Because, yeah.

She can _fly_.

She picks her way around the outside of the crowd, no real idea of what she’s doing, just enjoying the cooler air away from the crush of bodies, the way everyone around her feels so damn thrilled just to be alive.

And then Shaw is there.

Shaw is there, and she doesn’t remember when she lost track of him, but he’s there, and she feels herself grinning way too wide, just at the sight he makes.

He’s lost his jacket somewhere along the way, and he’s got his sleeves pushed up to above his elbows, and there’s a cut across his forehead and blood on his nice white shirt, and marks on the palms of his hands that might be burns.

She thinks he looks great.

He says something, but the crowd is too loud, too chaotic, and she can’t hear him, not really.

“What?”

He leans closer, just an inch away from her ear, and he still has to shout to be heard.

“So apparently you can fly now?” he manages, and Raven laughs out loud.

“Later,” she yells back, and laces her fingers through his, ignores the way that his hand feels so cold at first, because the longer she holds on, the more she thinks she could maybe get used to it. “We’ll figure that out later.”

After all, she does owe him a dance.

Raven pulls Shaw after her, and he follows without a question, and she lets the crowd part around them and then swallow them up again, and she’s too tired to be really dancing, but the song is still nice and slow, so she can do this—can put her arms around Shaw’s neck and let him move them sort of absently through a series of half-remembered steps.

_God,_ she thinks, and the voice in her head sounds a little bit like Murphy and a little bit like Diyoza and also a little bit exactly like herself. _What a freaking cliché._


End file.
